El dibujo y el collage en la narrativa de Martín Gaite

Los dibujos y collages realizados por la escritora han sido poco estudiados por la crítica. Se cuenta con el excelente artículo de Kathleen Glenn titulado ┤Collage, Textile and Palimpsest: Carmen Martín Gaite's Nubosidad variable' en el que analiza detalladamente el collage que adorna la portada de la novela y lo considera como "a visualization of the novel's content and structure" (Glenn, 1993: 409). Años anteriores a la publicación de dicha novela, Martín Gaite ya había elaborado otros collages. Cinco de ellos aparecen en From Fiction to Metafiction. Con la publicación de Cuadernos de todo, se incrementa el material visual elaborado por la escritora ya que además de collages, se pueden apreciar algunos dibujos. Cualquier persona que haya leído Caperucita en Manhattan se habrá dado cuenta que los dibujos de la novela fueron hechos por la autora de la novela. Durante los años noventa, Martín Gaite escribe conferencias donde comenta el trabajo de pintores españoles como Dalí, Murillo, Maura y Montaner y Tuset. En esa misma época, participa en el Museo Thyssen Bornemisza con el comentario sobre Habitación de hotel de Edward Hopper. En este artículo, voy a trabajar con los dibujos, los collages y los artículos sobre los pintores ya mencionados porque en todos ellos radica la idea de que lo visual es material para lo literario y lo literario también se entrecruza con lo visual. Me interesa mostrar el proceso de cómo Martín Gaite utiliza la imagen visual y la convierte en texto porque considero que existe una serie de acciones similares a las identificadas y señaladas en sus reflexiones de cómo construir una novela vaciadas en El cuento de nunca acabar. También analizaré el proceso inverso, es decir, el de tener primero un texto que posteriormente se represente visualmente. Con esto, pretendo mostrar la relación intrínseca entre lo visual y lo literario por medio del dibujo, el collage y la pintura en la narrativa de los noventa de Martín Gaite.

Metahistoria nacional y metaficcion biografica en "Historia de Mayta", de Mario Vargas Llosa

The thesis explores Mario Vargas Llosa's Historia de Mayta in light of recent studies of Latin America's new historical novel (Menton, Juan-Navarro) and in connection with contemporary literary theory (Waugh, Stonehill) and new trends in the philosophy of history (White, Foucault). In my study, I focus on three major levels of analysis: (1) significant events in Peruvian history to which the novel alludes; (2) biographical elements that strongly evoke the lives of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Jacinto Renteria, and Vargas Llosa himself; and (3) the self-referential devices that aim at questioning the validity of empirical analysis in both fiction and history. The allegorical dimension of the novel's view of modern Peruvian politics, its biographical component, and the self-consciousness of its historiographic approach make of Historia de Mayta both a metahistory of Peru and a biographical metafiction. The thesis ultimately reveals the problematic borderline between fiction and reality, the novel and history.

Entre el terror y la irrealidad: La narrativa poetica postmoderna de Reinaldo Arenas

This study focuses on the works of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most prolific and controversial Latin American authors in the second half of the twentieth century. First, I propose Arenas as the creator of the Cuban revolutionary novel (a term coined by critics when referring to the narrative written after the revolution), within the scope of postmodern historiographic metafiction and against the trend of the official revolutionary novel promoted by the political establishment. Through the analysis of the five novels of the pentagony and other texts, my study follows the tragic journey of the antihero protagonist, from adolescence into adulthood, registering the correlation between his existential crisis and the narrative historical discourse. Contemporary Cuba from 1959 onwards—the historical-political circumstances that afflicted and overwhelmed him the most—becomes the point of reference to deconstruct reality and reaffirm the existence of a “self” threatened by the violence of a totalitarian discourse. Out of the fragments of this reality, Arenas undertook a radical reconstruction in which he inverted and questioned every inherited cultural value, as well as the power structures. Within this context, Arenas projects what I call “the Cuban hideous unreal”, an ontological and literary vision antagonistic to the carpentirean concept of the American “marvelous real”. ^ Despite the ostracism Reinaldo Arenas suffered for ten years, this study shows how he established through his work a meditative dialogue with himself and the common man. This perspective formulates a permanent literary and philosophic reflection with thinkers and writers of his country and the West, as the basis for a rejection of the Cuban reality. The resultant interdisciplinary and postmodern dialogue constitutes one of the most significant and distinctive contributions of his work. ^

Metahistoria nacional y metaficción biográfica en Historia de Mayta, de Mario Vargas Llosa

The thesis explores Mario Vargas Llosa's Historia de Mayta in light of recent studies of Latin America's new historical novel (Menton, Juan-Navarro) and in connection with contemporary literary theory (Waugh, Stonehill) and new trends in the philosophy of history (White, Foucault). In my study, I focus on three major levels of analysis: 1) significant events in Peruvian history to which the novel alludes; 2) biographical elements that strongly evoke the lives of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Jacinto Rentería, and Vargas Llosa himself; and 3) the self-referential devices that aim at questioning the validity of empirical analysis in both fiction and history. The allegorical dimension of the novel's view of modern Peruvian politics, its biographical component, and the self-consciousness of its historiographic approach make of Historia de Mayta both a metahistory of Perú and a biographical metafiction. The thesis ultimately reveals the problematic borderline between fiction and reality, the novel and history.

The Collusion of Feminist and Postmodernist Impulses in E.L. Doctorow’s "Ragtime"

Many critics of Doctorow have classified him as a postmodernist writer, acknowledging that a wide number of thematic and stylistic features of his early fiction emanate from the postmodern context in which he took his first steps as a writer. Yet, these novels have an eminently social and ethical scope that may be best perceived in their intellectual engagement and support of feminist concerns. This is certainly the case of Doctorow’s fourth and most successful novel, Ragtime. The purpose of this paper will be two-fold. I will explore Ragtime’s indebtedness to postmodern aesthetics and themes, but also its feminist elements. Thus, on the one hand, I will focus on issues of uncertainty, indeterminacy of meaning, plurality and decentering of subjectivity; on the other hand, I will examine the novel’s attitude towards gender oppression, violence and objectification, its denunciation of hegemonic gender configurations and its voicing of certain feminist demands. This analysis will lead to an examination of the problematic collusion of the mostly white, male, patriarchal aesthetics of postmodernism and feminist politics in the novel. I will attempt to establish how these two traditionally conflicting modes coexist and interact in Ragtime.

The flow of reality’s development: from postmodernism to post-postmodernism in John Irving’s The World According to Garp and Last Night in Twisted River

In this master’s thesis, I examine the development of writer-characters and metafiction from John Irving’s The World According to Garp to Last Night in Twisted River and how this development relates to the development of late twentieth century postmodern literary theory to twenty-first century post-postmodern literary theory. The purpose of my study is to determine how the prominently postmodern feature metafiction, created through the writer-character’s stories-within-stories, has changed in form and function in the two novels published thirty years apart from one another, and what possible features this indicates for future post-postmodern theory. I establish my theoretical framework on the development of metafiction largely on late twentieth-century models of author and authorship as discussed by Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth and Michel Foucault. I base my close analysis of metafiction mostly on Linda Hutcheon’s model of overt and covert metafiction. At the end of my study, I examine Irving’s later novel through Suzanne Rohr’s models of reality constitution and fictional reality. The analysis of the two novels focuses on excerpts that feature the writer-characters, their stories-within-stories and the novels’ other characters and the narrators’ evaluations of these two. I draw examples from both novels, but I illustrate my choice of focus on the novels at the beginning of each section. Through this, I establish a method of analysis that best illustrates the development as a continuum from pre-existing postmodern models and theories to the formation of new post-postmodern theory. Based on my findings, the thesis argues that twenty-first century literary theory has moved away from postmodern overt deconstruction of the narrative and its meaning. New post-postmodern literary theory reacquires the previously deconstructed boundaries that define reality and truth and re-establishes them as having intrinsic value that cannot be disputed. In establishing fictional reality as self-governing and non-intrudable, post-postmodern theory takes a stance against postmodern nihilism, which indicates the re-founded, non-questionable value of the text’s reality. To continue mapping other possible features of future post-postmodern theory, I recommend further analysis solely on John Irving’s novels’ published in the twenty-first century.

Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Arqueles Vela: la novela-esponja

[es] Las «novelas de la nebulosa» de Ramón Gómez de la Serna, la narrativa estridentista de Arqueles Vela y la prosa de vanguardia en general se inscriben en un contexto en el que el individuo establece una relación caótica con la realidad. Este estudio comparativo de las novelas ¡Rebeca! (1937) y La Señorita Etcétera (1922), de Gómez de la Serna y Vela, respectivamente, muestra que ambas obras comparten una serie de rasgos: la combinación de recursos provenientes de la tradición y la modernidad, la fragmentación de la anécdota, la búsqueda de una mujer ideal (múltiple y discontinua), la ambigüedad y la metaficción. [en] Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s «novelas de la nebulosa», Arqueles Vela’s stridentist narrative and avant-gard prose generally arise in a context in which the individual establishes a chaotic relationship with reality. This comparative study of their respective novels ¡Rebeca! (1937) and La Señorita Etcétera (1922) shows that both works share some common features: the combination of resources from tradition and modernity, the dissolution of the story, the search for an ideal woman (multiple and discontinuous), ambiguity and metafiction.